| The Auschwitz Institution |
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[doc…] tors did at times conduct something on the
order of a sick call for inmates, but usually only grudgingly or even brutally.
The doctors’ manner tended to be military: from the start, their
medical function was subsumed to requirements of the camps and the legitimation
of brutality and killing. For instance, doctors signed forms attesting to
prisoners’ capacity to withstand corporal punishment or to undergo
transfer to another camp. While the doctors also had the actual medical
function of controlling and preventing epidemics, their concern tended to be
solely with the health of SS personnel.
Auschwitz was created, in June
1940, on the model of the traditional concentration camp, and was apparently
intended then mainly for Polish prisoners and as a quarantine and transit camp
from which prisoners were sent to camps in Germany. The medical arrangements at
Auschwitz were originally the same as those in traditional concentration camps.
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| Auschwitz as Work
Camp |
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In concentration camps, work was always required of
prisoners, was generally part of a systematic program, of terror and
humiliation, and was often a means of gradual but intentional killing — of
Poles as well as Jews. From 1937, the work force in camps became sufficiently
organized to be considered an important national source of forced labor, and
increasing arrests were motivated by the need for such labor. As with T4
inmates, prisoners came to be judged as worthy of life only to the extent that
their ability to work contributed to the power of the Third Reich — which
made them, as has been pointed out, “less than slaves.”11
But underneath that pragmatism was the
Nazis’ worship of work, and their mythology that prisoners could earn
their freedom by means of work. This mythology was especially promulgated by
Eicke, who probably was responsible — without irony — for the
notorious Arbeit macht frei (“Work brings freedom”) sign first
put up at Dachau and then at the entrance to Auschwitz.*
From at least
late 1941, the work function began to take on central importance in the camps
and that led eventually to relative improvement in conditions for prisoners
concerning such things as confinement arrangements and food, and in some cases
monetary awards, cigarettes, and access to camp brothels. The focus on work
coincided with the camps’ becoming subordinated, in March 1941, to the SS
Economic and Administrative Department (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt,
or WVHA) |
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* In Höss’s words,
“It was Eicke’s firm intention that no matter what category, those
prisoners whose steady and zealous work marked them out from the other should
in due course be released, regardless of what the Gestapo and the Criminal
Police Office might think to the contrary. Indeed this occasionally happened,
until the war put an end to all such good intentions.”12 |
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